Friday, May 07 2010
By Ben Hoyle, Arts Correspondent(Times Online)
If Winston Churchill had known a little more about the bright young BBC producer who spent an afternoon with him, he might have chosen his words more carefully.
Instead, his dedication in a copy of Arms and the Covenant in October 1938 is short, effusive and loaded with irony apparent only with hindsight: “To Guy Burgess, from Winston S Churchill, to confirm his admirable sentiments.”
The inscription offers a tantalising glimpse of the encounter between one of Britain’s most notorious KGB spies and one of its greatest heroes. It is part of an extraordinary cache of Churchilliana amassed over 30 years by Steve Forbes, the US publishing magnate and politician, which is to be broken up and sold by Christie’s in three separate sales in London and New York over the next year...
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